Rebecca Onion

Artists of the 1920s found the flapper-butterfly analogy too bewitching to resist.

Created by a paranoid duke, these cards were used for entertainment, not mystical divination.

Men once etched diary entries, rhymes, and souvenir maps on the horns used to carry their gunpowder.

Intricate, decorated "puzzle purses" were a feature of late 18th and early 19th century American courtship.

An ornate—but very necessary—item for a sport enmeshed in Britain's social hierarchy.

Coal was at the heart of early 19th-century England’s industrial progress, but until this lamp came along there was no safe way to see inside the mines.

In 1983, a struggling Atari dumped truckloads of goods in a New Mexico landfill. The dump was long considered an urban legend, until archeologists excavated in 2014 and found hundreds of games, manuals, cartridges and more. Now, the artifacts are in sever

The history of invisible ink veers wildly back and forth between high-tech methods and the humblest of approaches.